This project was conceived with the goal of revealing customer protection issues that may be going unreported and to collect better insights into underlying problems faced by customers in the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance sector. Seven grassroot level organizations were recruited to surface and harvest over 100 lived experiences of constrained Digital Financial Services’ customers. The customer stories capture the customer’s experience at each touchpoint of their customer journey – from onboarding to the point of grievance or exit – and document the process as well as their personal reflections and emotions.
Our findings from this project revealed typical low-income, constrained customers’ pain points. It also shed light on the respondents’ inhibitions at each stage of their customer journey, their constraints that go beyond literacy and digital familiarity, their expectations from the service provider, which were markedly different from the parameters which are checked for in customer satisfaction surveys.
The aggregate data from this exercise as well as the literature on service and its associated constructs point to gaps in service quality measurement, that warrant further investigation, specifically, the lack of consensus on what constitutes minimal service standards or adequate service quality. To conclude, we have developed a framework and tool that is meant to complement the existing set of service quality tools and metrics by assessing service quality adequacy from a constrained customer’s point of view.
